On Kennedys

A Glitch in the Genetic Syrup?

There was, amazingly, no New York Times obituary for Adam Walinsky, so I didn’t know that he died last November. We hadn’t spoken in years—my choice, more on that later—but he was a major influence on my life and thinking. He and Richard Goodwin were my link to the Kennedys—the original ones, the ones who sent me spinning on a career in journalism and politics, the ones who created that breezy, ironic style I aspired to, the ones who spoke eloquently about idealism and service. The sensibility of the 1960s evolved from the Kennedys.

I imagine it’s hard for younger generations to understand the impact the Kennedys had on mine: their utter freshness after the unfathomable, parental stolidity of Eisenhower, the romance of the “new generation of leadership,” the World War II heroism, the patriotic idealism. Everything about them was distinctive, the Boston accents, all that hair and teeth and cool. (Nixon provided a convenient surfeit of the opposite.) Indeed, I dreamed—I actually had a recurring dream—about playing touch football on the lawn at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy’s house, a little Jew amid all that chestnut hair and goyische grace. Years later, courtesy of Richard Goodwin—who hired me to be his deputy at the Rolling Stone Washington Bureau—I spent two weeks in that house, walking across that sloping lawn to the tennis court, to play with the likes of Art Buchwald and the maddening Ted Sorenson, whose every shot was a spin. It was the summer of 1974 and Hunter Thompson showed up to cover the end of Nixon; he and I removed all the Andy Williams—Ethel was dating the crooner at the time—from the juke box in the pool house and replaced it with Otis Redding. It was a mythic season.

But Adam. He wore his PT-109 tie clasp proudly, in an era when people had stopped wearing tie clasps. He was a difficult man, a Marine, a man of surpassing intellectual vigor—or vigah, as the Kennedys said. He had worked for Bobby, as a speechwriter. He worked in Bobby’s Justice Department. He worshipped the man, close—too close—to literally. He told me the story, perhaps not true, of handing Bobby prepared remarks which Bobby did not deliver the night Martin Luther King died. Instead, Kennedy gave one of the great impromptu speeches in American history, telling a crowd of black people in Indianapolis that King was dead, killed by a white man; he didn’t shy from the facts or the pain. He quoted Aeschylus to calm them. They went home peacefully, on a night when blacks across the country rioted, berserk with anger. It is one of my favorite moments, so respectful of the crowd and their grief, so brief, so real.

Adam also told me the story—also possibly apochryphal—of how he and RFK, trapped in a motel room during the Detroit riots, had come up with the idea of a superlative public service program, the Police Corps, in which college graduates would pay off their tuition by serving four years as a police officer. This would become Adam’s monument to RFK. Governor Bill Clinton served as president of the Police Corps board in the 1980s, and President Bill Clinton enacted the Police Corps into law in the 1990s. I wrote about it for The New Yorker. Walinsky created an extraordinary boot camp for these cops; it was residential, it involved rigorous physical training (most police shootings occurred, Adam believed, because cops weren’t as fit as the criminals, who could run faster). The police corps recruits were taught, as Special Forces are, to respond with discipline to unexpected situations. They didn’t shoot at stationary targets on a range, but used paint-ball guns in situational exercises: that kid reaching into his pocket on the dark staircase might be pulling out a weapon…or a stick of gun. They were taught arrest and control by a Navy SEAL, Lew Hicks, who had 101 ways—if I remember correctly—to take down a suspect without causing long-term physical damage. There was an extensive reading list, on leadership, on police work (Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” among others), on the sociology of the inner city. It was a brilliant program. It existed in 17 states. It should be revived, nationally.

Adam was a tortured man. He spent his life looking for another Bobby. He wanted Teddy to be the guy, but he was a different kind of Kennedy. He offered himself to Mario Cuomo, Bill Clinton, John Kerry. They all disappointed; his fantasy of a perfect Bobby ramified over the years, a Bobby tough and suffering and suffused with idealism and angst. I stayed in touch with Adam, always learning from him, reading the books—inevitably tough ones—he recommended. But he became embittered by all the liberal politicians who rejected him over the years. And when, in 2016, he endorsed Donald Trump for President, that was it for me. I didn’t want to be poisoned by what he’d become; I didn’t want to have the argument with him. I’d seen him argue; it always involved yelling, bullying. I didn’t return his phone calls. We never talked again.

But no obituary in The New York Times? Every gender “activist” seems to rate one these days. Adam was worth a lot more than that; if nothing else, as an exemplar of the romance and idealism of the Kennedy years gone wrong. I found out about his death a few days ago from Jeff Greenfield, who wrote for RFK, too, and was a friend of Adam’s….It was a day before Robert Kennedy Jr. revealed, in a perfect metaphor, that he’d once had a parasitic worm in his brain. A worm who ate memory.

I’ve known several of Bobby Kennedy’s children and their cousins, but not RFK Jr. Almost all had a damaged sweetness to them, which rubbed up against their idealism and sense of responsibility, and the weight of history. There was a glitch in the genetic syrup that led to excess and often, tragedy. For most—both Joes, Kathleen, Caroline, Kerry, the Shrivers (these are among the Kennedys I’ve met)—the torch is carried with pride and honor. For a few, it was all just too much: David Kennedy was a wonderful kid, who died of a heroin overdose. And it all may be just too much for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., too. I don’t know him, but he seems a bit like Adam Walinsky to me, a case of misplaced ardor and intensity. He has spun off into conspiracies and silliness—on vaccines, on January 6, on the Covid virus being engineered to spare Jews and Chinese. Adam supported Trump; Bobby Jr. may reelect him.

Surely, his campaign can come to no good. He will take votes from Trump, but Trump has a solid, impregnable 46% of the electorate. Kennedy might take fewer votes from Biden, but they will cost more, because Biden has a smaller, squishier core constituency. He may cost Biden states like Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania….If he makes it all the way to Election Day. Beacause the next six months are likely to be the most painful of RFK Jr.’s life—every last, past escapade will be unearthed, whatever privacy his family has had will be trashed. He will be—he has been—alienated from his brothers and sisters, and their children. It will be a running, suppurating embarrassment, worse than heroin withdrawal.

Another memory: I was on a small plane with Ted Kennedy after he was trounced by Jimmy Carter in Iowa in 1980. We were headed to New Hampshire, where he knew he would be trounced by Carter again. It was unthinkable, a Kennedy beaten in a state contiguous to Massachusetts; unthinkable, a Kennedy not winning a nomination. How would he respond? Brilliantly, it turned out. He became a different candidate—freer, funnier, more passionate than the stilted, frozen fellow who couldn’t explain to CBS’s Roger Mudd why he wanted to be President. He lost the race, but he had been released. He wouldn’t have to be President now. He was free to become who Ted Kennedy was supposed to be: an excellent, beloved Senator. RFK Jr might consider that lesson. Seeking the ultimate prize can be a straitjacket, a fatal twisting of the inner core.

Another thought: all RFK Jr’s ailments seem allegories, not just the worm that eats memories. His voice is strangled by a condition called, "spasmodic dysphonia, a specific form of an involuntary movement disorder called dystonia that affects only the voice box." He can’t talk clearly; the plague of all plagues for a Kennedy, He’s also suffered one more symbolic disease: mercury poisoning, the result of eating too much fish. It’s yet another case of the admirable leading to the bizarre—poisoned by an excess of virtue! As Adam Walinsky had been. This Kennedy stuff was lethal to those who took it too literally. The best minds of my generation were lifted by it; all of us who found careers in public life were affected by it—but some were crushed by trying too hard to be like them.

And yet, and yet…to be made crazy by idealism is, in a profound way, better than to have been rendered hopeless by cynicism. To think of America as a grand adventure, a New Frontier in human freedom and creativity, is far superior to the pessimism and paranoia that prevails among the Trumpers…and the scheme-addled supporters of RFK Jr. today. It is the ultimate betrayal: Robert F. Kennedy stood for hope and idealism; his son stands for hopeless submission to the blood seductions of the irrational extreme. Am I wrong to feel more sorry than angry?

Greg Schneiders

You meet a lot of a lot of jerks in politics. Greg Schneiders was not one of them. Indeed, he was quite the opposite—smart, insightful, humble, honest. He was one of Jimmy Carter’s youngest strategists. He became a friend, later on. The two of us had a native optimism about America we shared as members—he was the founder; I, an acolyte—of the “What me Worry” caucus, dueling constantly against the pessimistic “Chicken Little” caucus in the discussions that zoom among the extended Carter family. Greg passed away in his sleep the other day. I will miss his wisdom and constancy, and camaraderie. I wish there were more like him but, sadly, the supply appears to be dwindling.